


Passiflora

by thespectaclesofthor



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Actual Father-Son Hugs, Anxiety, Awkward attempts at trying to find out what's wrong, Flashbacks, Hades A+ Parenting, Hades and Zagreus father-son relationship recovery too, Healing, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, More detail given to recovery, Multi, Nightmares, Off-screen Rape, Polyamory, Post-Endgame, Post-Trauma, Rape Recovery, Recovery, Spoilers for Hades, Suicidal Ideation, Supported Zagreus, Trauma Recovery, Whump, canon-typical dying all the time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:01:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28526634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thespectaclesofthor/pseuds/thespectaclesofthor
Summary: When exalted shades in Elysium are emboldened and corrupted by Zagreus’ combination of boons, the unthinkable happens for the first time within hundreds of runs, and Zagreus is assaulted. Shocked to find himself traumatised by anything at all, he begins to avoid Elysium at all costs, and others begin to notice…
Relationships: Hades & Zagreus (Hades Video Game), Megaera/Thanatos/Zagreus (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 210
Kudos: 689





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The shape of this story has been bugging me for a while now, and I've decided to finally actually write it out. It's mostly - of all things - an excuse for a very awkward father/son bonding fic, and the rating is there for the noncon / mature themes.

Zagreus was drunk on lust and something like the dark magic that lived in the ferment of grapes. A cocktail of boons from Aphrodite and Dionysus so bright that his mind burst with delusions of his own incredible strength and virility. He powered onwards and upwards, as he always did, for this was his job now and today he loved it more than ever; he loved everything, dosed bright and greedy with the deities of love and lust on his side.

Asterius took one look at him, as Zagreus was fair glowing with wreaths of pink and violet, and he grimaced.

‘Be careful, small one, for you are drunk on your own power and the glint of death rests around you.’

‘Come, now, Asterius! We could have a drink if you like, we need not always battle like this. What is it, the two hundredth? Three hundredth time? The perfect time to share a drink and some memories, is it not?’

A snort, and Asterius put his head down, his eyes opaque and focused.

Of course Zagreus destroyed him, half-hard the entire time, as drunk on his own power as Asterius had claimed.

It was beautiful.

It was three rooms later that it happened.

*

In retrospect, he could only conclude that some combination of those boons – he’d never been offered so many by Aphrodite and Dionysus before at the same time – did something to the shades around him. Corrupted them. Animated them with lust or drunkenness, made them more cunning, or perhaps he was simply stupider.

In retrospect, he’d been dazed by attacks from soul catchers, because he’d been too distracted to pay attention to the kisses from those cruel pink butterflies. He was jabbed all over with the pain of phantom insects because the greatshields and strongbows weren’t behaving the way they should. It was usually downright predictable by now, what to expect, and yet every one of them that touched the shimmering gleam of his godly powers picked up a knowing that showed itself in the tilt of their heads, or the way the strongbows would pause and look hungrily over their shoulder at Zagreus, even as they fled to notch their arrows from a safer distance.

He told himself that in retrospect, he could never have seen it coming. He hadn’t even thought shades capable of that sort of malicious _animus._

There was usually an innocence in the way they constantly tried to kill him.

But there was nothing innocent about what they’d been empowered to do when he’d been close to death. And then they’d killed him anyway, making not the sounds of the mindlessly violent, but the rutting sounds of those who had conquered and would ravage their quarry in every way they knew how.

*

He arrived back in the House of Hades with nothing to say, still shaking. He wiped the blood off his body with the towels now provided near the pool of Styx and felt exposed, like everyone would know. Of course he was reborn, he bore no signs of the injuries that had destroyed him, and yet…

His greatest fear was that Hades’ constant promises that he saw _everything_ would be true. But Hades was working at the end of the great hall, he didn’t look up.

Zagreus watched him and wondered if that meant that Hades knew and didn’t _care._

But no, that was a stretch, even for his father.

A relief to walk amongst the more benign shades here and see that Hypnos wasn’t there to stare at him in horror when he realised how Zagreus had died. His mother, Persephone, was away, likely with Demeter.

Hades didn’t even look up as Zagreus passed.

Zagreus’ steps were muted as he crossed elaborate, grand tiles, every inch of the occasionally jewelled ground beneath him showing off the extreme wealth of his father, the kingdom of Hades.

He told himself he was relieved that Nyx wasn’t there either, but he stood there by the lilacs in their great vases that he’d ordered just for her. He breathed in their scent and wished for something unnameable.

He knew he should let the Head Chef know about the fish he’d caught, but he didn’t want to see Dusa or Meg, and he observed his own actions wryly as though from a great distance. This wasn’t like him at all. He’d shaken off hundreds of deaths by now, some certainly involving torture and privation and pain in the past. Nothing like what happened today, but pain all the same. Yet here he was, still shaking.

‘Well,’ he said to himself as he walked into his room, ‘this is new.’

*

He didn’t sleep.

He looked through his Codex. He played the lyre. He sat on the edge of his bed, legs crossed, and stared down absently at the embroidery on the rich fabric and wondered at the phantom pains he felt inside his body. Normally this wasn’t an issue at all. Was it possible for a death to go wrong? Had he left some part of him up there in Elysium?

He felt like he had.

A burst of dry laughter. Perhaps there _was_ something the shades in Elysium could do in order to stop people from escaping. That was _very_ effective indeed.

Somehow he suspected he wasn’t going to be telling his father about it, any time soon.

*

Time passed, though far more slowly than usual, feeling like the days when he was a child and had just realised his father hated him and he couldn’t figure out why or how to fix it, no matter what he did. Those days passed training with Achilles in order to be the best that he could be, turning to look at his father, while holding a sword far too big for him. And Hades with his head down, grumbling about the paperwork, never acknowledging him.

Or: ‘You’re going to kill yourself with a sword that size. Consider yourself warned.’

Of course, dying was par for the course in the underworld too, and Zagreus did die a few times as a child before Achilles realised that training children was nothing like training adults and made necessary adjustments.

Those days had wound on slowly, though there were moments of respite with the others – Meg and Than and Hypnos – or playing with Cerberus, moments when Hades wasn’t there to scold him too heavily for it.

But overall, parts of his childhood had dragged as Zagreus spent his time trying to find ways to get through to his father and always failing. Nyx was responsive to him, and loving, but she was the night herself, and her coldness and aloofness was no lesser love, yet he sometimes felt like he needed something more. Some warmth, some aliveness.

Something that he now knew he gained by having Persephone back in his life.

Though she still hadn’t returned from visiting Demeter, and he was glad of it.

*

He changed his weapon to Aegis, summoning the aspect of Beowulf to the brutally sized shield and shuddering as the power wrapped around him. For a moment, even the power curling around him felt invasive, and he dropped the shield like it was poisonous. It clanged to the ground, rocking back and forth, and Zagreus stared at it in shock, then at his own fingers.

He didn’t drop _weapons._

‘Got oil on your hands, boyo? Come on then, get that shield up and get me already, unless you’re too much of a coward?’

‘Not today, Skelly,’ Zagreus said absently, picking up Aegis and holding it close to his body.

There was no solution except to keep fighting until his body forgot what it had been through. It was no different to any of his other deaths. He wasn’t some creature of the living, to be wounded the way they were wounded. He was indulging something that mattered not at all. And if he didn’t accept that combination of boons again, he couldn’t see how it would ever happen again.

Unless they remembered. Unless the shades themselves had returned to Elysium after their deaths and remembered what they’d done, in the same way he remembered what was done to him.

No.

It didn’t work that way. If it did, they’d be better fighters by now.

_They are better fighters, or they wouldn’t have assaulted you like that._

Zagreus grimaced, ignored Skelly, and felt like he couldn’t quite take a deep breath as he escaped his father’s house and set out into Tartarus.

*

The fear was a slinking, viscous ooze. It crawled up his feet, wound up his legs, made his calves more tense than usual, made his ligaments lose their bounce, and his reflexes suffered. He took more hits than usual.

It was Zeus who found him first, and Zagreus stood there struck by an urge to beg for something that would allow him to smite all of his enemies before they could rip at his clothing and his skin and between his legs. It shamed him to stand there while Zeus treated him with respect, almost like an equal, to know how he’d been defeated last time.

He stood in the empty chamber feeling staticky from Zeus’ offered boon, the hairs on his body standing on end.

He profoundly did not want to reach Elysium, and he was furious at himself for it.

He’d died in countless painful ways, there was no reason for this to be happening at all.

Yet, perhaps if he died early, he could avoid a repeat of last time. He could tell Hades that the underworlds were safer than ever. That was what Hades wanted, after all, an underworld that was harder to escape. No one would know what happened to him, what he’d _let_ happen to him. He wouldn’t have to hear his father’s shame, or worse, his mocking, cruel laughter.

Zagreus stood there imagining how it would have been if he’d made it to his father beyond the temple of Styx, bleeding from places he’d never bled before – at least not like that and not for that reason – only to try and kill him.

He felt exhausted.

When he realised he was getting closer to Meg or one of her sisters, he found himself carelessly taking easy hits from the wretched shades that lived in Tartarus, and he wasn’t entirely upset to find himself suffering so badly that he couldn’t recover when three brimstones targeted him at once. Their lasers were painful, they always were, but it was a different kind of pain.

A cleaner pain.

So he died in Tartarus for the first time in so long it felt like novelty, instead of the failure that it was.

*

‘Wow!’ Hypnos exclaimed. ‘What _happened?_ Tartarus, huh? Didn’t think a brimstone would ever hurt you again, not like that, just goes to show you can’t be too quick on your feet! I’m sure that’s something my brother would say!’

Zagreus stared at him, but either Hypnos hadn’t checked the ledger properly the last time he’d died, or maybe he’d misread it, but he didn’t seem to have any clue at all as to why Zagreus might have been killed in Tartarus this time.

Hypnos gazed at him with a kind of sleepy surprise, the expression that still somehow judged the way he’d died as though Hypnos would ever have any chance of surviving an escape attempt through the underworld. Zagreus felt a flash of irritation that he quashed immediately, shocked at himself.

He turned and walked away.

When Nyx smiled at him, he smiled back, and couldn’t quite remember what he’d been seeking from her last time. The smell of lilacs annoyed him.

He felt cold.

Something hardened inside of him.

*

He died in Tartarus again, learning that hard way that the claustrophobic chaining attacks of wringers felt alarmingly like what had happened to him in Elysium. He’d killed them out of pure, vengeful spite, and was glad no one was there to see him.

And then he died again, this time to Megaera’s raw power. Her eyes flew open when she realised her attacks had been fatal, and as he sank to the ground, his insides exposed to the dank Tartarus air, he heard her say:

‘…Zagreus?’

Hypnos said nothing this time, only watched him, eyes narrowed not from fatigue, but from something else.

Zagreus said not a word, and he smiled at Nyx, smiled at Orpheus, took down the posters of Aphrodite and Dionysus in this room, and thought he just needed to figure it out. He just needed to keep going and then he’d get over it.

*

Tartarus, dying again and again. Megaera wrapping her whip around his neck to choke him to death, her eyes burning with fury as she rasped:

‘You’d better not be doing this as some kind of favour to me, Zagreus. _Fight,_ damn you!’

And he was fighting, because he didn’t like anything around his neck these days, and he was panicked and _scared,_ and his fingers were doing as much damage to his neck as her whip was, and oh, he was dying again.

Good.

That was good.

Asphodel was too close to Elysium, and he was beginning to feel he might never actually make it back to those green fields. Which meant no more small talk with Asterius, no more chats with Patroclus.

He felt strangely bereft as he died of suffocation, his fingers wet with his own blood, and somehow he ended up in Megaera’s lap, her arm around his shoulder, even as her whip choked the life out of him.

‘…This isn’t like you,’ she said, her voice coming to him as though from a distance.

_Tell me about it,_ he thought.

*

That evening, returning into the endlessness of night herself, he laid down on his bed and slept. That was another failure, given he didn’t need to sleep and didn’t even _like_ to sleep. But he wanted something that felt a little longer lasting than death, and sleep was all he knew to try.

But they found him there.

Greatshields and strongbows both, exalted by Hades into Elysium, nourished with nectar and ambrosia, fallen heroes that were once mortal, now endless and eternal and empowered as they ripped off his red toga and shredded through the rest of his clothing. Zagreus fought back, of course he did, but there were arrows pinning him down through his arms, his side, and a greatshield had slammed his shield down into Zagreus’ shoulder, half-cleaving his right arm from his body.

That was how Zagreus assumed he’d die.

The smell of grass was bright and green and strong. He’d been into the mortal realm now, many times, and he knew what grass really smelled like. But here in Elysium it was like a dream of grass, as though all these shades have been imagining paradise for so long, it had become an amplified version of itself. Flowers smelled sweeter, blood was brighter, nectar was thicker, and somehow the pain of what the first strongbow was doing to him in rhythmic, sawing movements was magnified too. 

He could barely even look at the reality of it in his nightmares. It was foggy and slid in and out of focus. He was barely in his body. Zagreus was an echo of himself, floating above the world, looking down at the idiot who got drunk on his own power – as Asterius said – and walked right into this disaster.

It hurt.

Somehow, it hurt more than the shield in his shoulder, which should be impossible. He found himself thinking that it wasn’t just a physical pain, but some other kind of pain. Something he didn’t know he could feel, even after a lifetime of dealing with Hades as his father, even after a lifetime of feeling trapped and useless while watching everyone else fulfil their destiny. Even sleepy Hypnos, who was so cherished despite being somewhat inept for such a long time.

Even he wasn’t useless.

This pain was like that feeling, but much, much worse. It was the loneliest murder he’d ever experienced.

There was a brief, fleeting moment where he wished, somehow, he’d hear the sound of a gong and Thanatos would turn up and save him. But that would involve Thanatos turning up and _seeing_ him. The wish vanished into the grunts of the lusty creatures around him, and Zagreus felt a great door clang shut inside of him.

He didn’t know what that door allowed him to access until it closed.

When he woke, gasping and terrified and tearful, he forced himself up and out of his room and grabbed the shield again.

Skelly asked him something, Zagreus didn’t pay attention.

He was determined to break that door inside of himself open again. Determined to escape properly this time. He only had to prove to himself that it had been a freak accident, a one time thing. That was all.

He died in Tartarus.

Again.

*

This time, Hades looked up at him as Zagreus tried to take the shortcut through the kitchen. And Zagreus was frozen, even as he knew that Hades would leave him alone if Zagreus was quick about getting out of his direct line of sight.

‘Boy,’ Hades said, never quite getting the hang of using his name, even after all this time. ‘I need to speak with you for a moment. Come here.’

Zagreus had never really felt afraid of his father before. Not since he was a child, anyway. He wasn’t really afraid when he was failing to kill him in the beginning, and not even when it had been touch-and-go quite a few times since.

But he felt fear now. He tried to hide it, knew he hadn’t succeeded, and knew his father knew something was different. His father’s presence was huge in the entire kingdom, it would be with him ruling it all. But now Zagreus felt every inch of that power over the underworld, and knew himself to be only some scrappy thing that could no longer do the job that he’d invented for himself, that his father had consented to give him because there was literally nothing else Zagreus was good at.

Except perhaps reuniting his estranged family and, well, he’d done that.

‘Hypnos informs me that you have been dying an unusual number of times in Tartarus. That is unlike you. Report.’

‘Well, it had to happen at some point, father,’ Zagreus said, amazed at the dry, confident voice that spilled from his lips, like he was the same as he’d always been. ‘Perhaps the wretched shades _can_ learn how to better protect your kingdom. I thought you’d be proud.’

Hades stared at him, and Zagreus stared back, and wondered if Hades could see the closed door, the gaping torn hole inside of him.

‘Pride is for the weak and the mortal,’ Hades said with acerbic finality, and turned back to his work.

Zagreus refused to breathe a sigh of relief until he got back to his room, and there breathed quickly and dizzily until he got himself under control again. He stared into the Mirror and tried to decide what would best save him from what had happened to him all those deaths ago, and then sank down into the chair and still couldn’t quite believe how hung up he was on that death.

*

He died in Tartarus again. Brimstones. And then just before seeing Meg, because he couldn’t stand her looking at him like something was wrong. And then the third time, just standing on a trap and bursting into manic laughter even as he bled out.

That time, after he was reborn in the Styx, Megaera and Thanatos were both waiting for him in his room. Zagreus stared at them.

People were noticing. Even the Gods of Olympus had noticed. Zagreus was going out of his way to avoid Aphrodite and Dionysus, to the point where they had to be aware it was happening.

It was Artemis herself who had asked:

‘ _No one_ needs a reason to avoid Dionysus aside from simply knowing him, if you ask me. But I don’t recall you ever avoiding him like this, and he’s moped about enough around here that even I’ve heard about it. I don’t normally ask this, but from one hunter to another, is something wrong? Are our gifts to you not working well enough anymore? I don’t profess to know how it is down there, but if there’s something…one of the _others_ could do. Of course there’s not much _I_ can do except make sure your arrows fly straight and true, and you’re using that shield…’

Zagreus had deflected as graciously as he knew how, and Artemis’ energy had felt unsure and watchful, but it felt like that a good majority of the time anyway. And then she was gone, and he was stronger than ever, and wished that didn’t mean he stood a better chance of getting to Asphodel, and therefore Elysium.

So he’d died in Tartarus.

Now, Meg and Than were just standing there. Both looking grim.

‘Well, it’s never bad to see the both of you in my room at the same time,’ Zagreus said, offering them what he hoped was a charismatic smile. ‘Unfortunately, I’m a bit washed out when it comes to entertaining the two of you at once. But you could entertain each other?’

Thanatos made a small sound of exasperation. Meg shifted her coiled whip against her hip and pursed her lips.

‘You told your father that we had gotten stronger in Tartarus, but as one who works there daily, I know this isn’t true. What’s going on, Zag? Is something wrong?’

‘Truth be told,’ he said, shoving his panic of being seen or known deep down where they couldn’t find it, ‘I’m bored. I’ve escaped hundreds times in a row, you know, only to always die in the mortal realm. I decided I wanted to know a bit more what it was like to die in this realm, you understand.’

‘Can’t say that I do,’ Thanatos said dubiously.

‘You can talk to us,’ Meg said, far more direct than Thanatos. ‘You know that, don’t you? We discussed long ago about how we have what we have out there, and how it doesn’t touch what we have down here. You can talk to either one of us. Or both. I know something’s wrong.’

‘It’s just a little boredom,’ Zagreus said with false cheer. ‘I’m sure I’ll get over it eventually. Anyway, got to go, those wretches aren’t going to kill themselves.’

As he exited his own room in a hurry – leaving them in there and feeling violated that they’d been _in_ there in the first place, which was a foolish – he heard Meg calling after him:

‘See you soon.’

He gritted his teeth together. Not if he could help it.

This time he managed to get halfway through Asphodel before his need to spite her was trumped by his all-consuming terror. He died short of meeting the Hydra – Lernie – and felt a kind of despair eat into him.

He couldn’t keep living like this.

Of course that was its own joke, but he wasn’t going to tell anyone else that he was the punchline.

*

It ate at him. It was corrosive.

When he saw Persephone, he greeted her like always, but the flush of warmth and goodness he felt when he saw her had vanished. They embraced, and he found himself examining the experience. He felt numb inside. She was warm, good, her skin had that crepe-like feeling and smelled faintly of pomegranates and herbs and winter, because she’d been with her mother. Everything was there, from her loving voice to the way she gazed at him with open affection, so the thing that was missing was in him.

He’d never thought of himself as a good actor, but she didn’t realise anything was wrong, and he couldn’t tell if he was grateful or disappointed.

Nyx knew something was wrong, but Zagreus could be prone to occasional bouts of moodiness and this wouldn’t be the first time. As he’d grown, before he started his escape attempts, he could be morose and sulky, or grumpy and bad-tempered. He and his father would snark with each other frequently, and when the blow ups between them were bad enough, he could definitely trail a bad attitude behind him in a way that made others give him a wide berth.

Perhaps she assumed it was that.

Sometimes he stood in his room and thought about who he’d talk to, what he’d say. But he’d imagine Thanatos staring at him with a vaguely perplexed, concerned expression on his face. The one that meant he knew Zagreus was upset but couldn’t understand why he’d lower himself to be distressed about the same things that distressed the mortals. He’d imagine Megaera telling him to get over it, or expressing surprise that it hadn’t happened before, or worse, regaling him with all the stories of how rife their world was with that sort of crime in the first place. Maybe she’d tell him he was naïve.

He couldn’t imagine telling Dusa at all.

He didn’t want to sully Persephone with it. The event was something that happened in Elysium, and it belonged there and there alone, and not in her world of gardens and growth. And he didn’t want to sully Nyx with it either, and his chest hurt, tight and tense, to imagine the way she’d say, ‘Oh, child,’ if he told her.

*

What he didn’t expect was his father towering in his doorway, staring around Zagreus’ room with open curiosity because he’d so rarely seen it, and not at all since Zagreus did everything up. Hades grumped about the House Contractor’s work, but Zagreus thought he secretly enjoyed it.

They stared at each other. Zagreus thought of a few quips, including the stellar: ‘I didn’t think it was possible for you to get lost in your own realm,’ but he didn’t say any of them. Instead, Zagreus remained leaning back against his bed, pretending to read, and his father stood there awkwardly.

‘I’ve not… We’ve not battled in some time,’ Hades said finally.

‘Huzzah, your security is working perfectly,’ Zagreus said and stared down at his book, increasingly tense. Then he looked up, scowling. ‘Surely you don’t miss being thrashed to death by me?’

_‘No,’_ Hades said, indignant.

‘One would think it saves you time, having to make the journey up there and back again.’

‘Boy, I swear you-’ And then he took a breath, a big one, and sighed it out. Zagreus thought it was amazing when his father took a breath like that. He was a huge being, a King, a God, and like Zeus his entire presence filled a space. Hades didn’t even have to try, it simply happened.

Right now, he was visibly trying to compose himself.

‘Zagreus,’ Hades said, which made Zagreus pay attention, because it meant he was _trying_ to actually be whatever he thought a good father was. ‘I know we don’t talk often, and perhaps you would be better suited going to Nyx or Persephone, but I can tell when something is wrong.’

Zagreus almost laughed at the idea that he’d tell his _father_ about what happened. It was so absurd, even as it hammered away inside of him, even as it hurt him for a reason he didn’t quite understand. Surely he’d struggle to tell his father something like this even if they had a _good_ relationship. But while things were civil between them, even downright…strangely at peace sometimes, they weren’t…

They weren’t that close.

His father was just staring at him, and for once, Zagreus couldn’t bring himself to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And a minute later, Hades looked truly alarmed, like he’d seen something that had shaken him. Zagreus almost thought his mind had been read, electric with a sudden, repressed terror at the thought.

‘Something is wrong,’ Hades said, as though he hadn’t been convinced until that moment.

‘It’s nothing I can’t deal with,’ Zagreus said finally. ‘You raised me to be nothing if not resilient, and we’re immortal beings aren’t we? Time erases all, in the end.’

Hades looked even more alarmed, but Zagreus didn’t have the energy to manage quips. His father was standing there _in his room._ His whole life was no longer normal. He didn’t have a script for this. Living for as long as he had, still hadn’t equipped him with the tools to know how to deal with this. And clearly Hades – who had lived for so long that it was no longer worth counting the years – didn’t have a script either.

‘Zagreus…’ Hades said, then grimaced. ‘I have to get back to work.’

‘Don’t let me keep you,’ Zagreus said, firmly looking down at the writing in his book.

‘I am not known for having much spare time, but your mother has taught me the importance of…making it. If you need to talk, I will make that time, Zagreus.’

There was no careless quip he could say in response to that, and Zagreus’ hands tightened on the book he couldn’t concentrate on. He looked up and nodded an acknowledgement, because his throat was too tight for him to manage anything like words.

Hades left, and Zagreus sat there for another few minutes before – unexpectedly angry at the entire world, it seemed – he left his room, grabbed the shield, and tried to escape again.

He died before he reached Lernie’s hissing, skeletal heads, screaming an endless, impotent rage at the spreaders that dispassionately cast their hundreds of projectiles at him. He died by drowning in his own fury, magic burning him alive. He’d fix this. He _would._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that Greek history and mythology is absolutely chock-a-block with rape and sexual misconduct, but _Hades_ as a game goes out of its way to rewrite and minimise a lot of this, or indicate it’s ‘myth only’ or ‘those silly humans will make stories about anything,’ so I’m following that game logic in the story! 
> 
> Also yes it grew a chapter, because Zagreus was stubborn about opening up. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's reading / commenting / giving kudos etc! You're all awesome :D

Zagreus was on his way to the hall of sculptures – the display hall before his father’s room – because it was quiet, there were only shades there, and they didn’t bother him. But on the way Achilles, who often bowed in acknowledgement and left it at that, had a fixed, determined look on his face, and Zagreus slowed automatically.

‘Greetings, lad,’ Achilles said. ‘Might I have a word?’

‘Of course,’ Zagreus said, stopping. Achilles had a way of speaking, behaving, that made Zagreus feel vulnerable around him. He looked over his shoulder and wondered if he could make excuses to escape once more from the House, get into Tartarus, die in Asphodel.

‘I have to ask, have you been feeling less than fair, of late? Patroclus said he hasn’t seen you in some time, that word around Elysium is you haven’t even walked among the heroes there, nor battled them.’

Zagreus pressed his lips together. It was harder to constantly find ways to say he was fine. He missed Patroclus. He missed the times he could sit and chat by that offshoot of the river Lethe, sometimes with the two of them, Achilles there as well. Zagreus and Patroclus had shared many long conversations, wiling away the hours sometimes in nothing more than companionable silence. His laconic but kind nature was something Zagreus related to and found familiar, even if Patroclus was more mournful than Zagreus himself.

‘Lad?’ Achilles said, shifting abruptly. ‘What is it?’

‘I could…buy you a drink if you want?’ Zagreus said, feeling shaky.

‘Yes, all right. I’d like that.’

A quiet, shadowed table in the dining room, down the corridor where the others wouldn’t hear them. It wasn’t normally where Zagreus sat, and Achilles was clearly uncomfortable because of it. But Zagreus thought that if he were going to talk about this _at all…_

He wasn’t going to. Not really.

But maybe he had to, in order to force it to leave him alone. He hated living this way. It had turned his life into something empty and broken. He couldn’t fight like he used to fight. He couldn’t enjoy his friends, his family, his extended family.

Over drinks, Zagreus was mostly silent until:

‘The exalted are immortalised heroes who died in the mortal realm, aren’t they?’

‘You know that as well as anyone, lad,’ Achilles said.

‘Do they remain heroes, in Elysium?’

Achilles frowned. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I don’t even know if mortals can become heroes in the first place if they’ve…’ Zagreus frowned, shaking his head slightly. He didn’t understand the world of mortals at all. ‘When you were mortal, was it- Was it normal for-? If you vanquish a foe or an enemy, and are looting and pillaging, does that include other kinds of violation? Physical kinds?’

Achilles had been nodding along slowly, following the line of conversation, but at that last sentence his head snapped up and his eyes glittered.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

‘Surely those people wouldn’t be exalted as heroes. And yet- Do you know if they were?’

‘Lad, what happened?’

‘Nothing! Nothing. This is a philosophical- Honestly, I’m likely just wasting your time. I’m only wondering if-’

_‘What happened?’_

It wasn’t like Achilles to be this firm with him. He hadn’t been this way since Zagreus was a child, playing with weapons too large and dangerous, and Achilles had realised he needed to be more authoritarian to stop Zagreus from accidentally killing himself in his enthusiasm to learn how to be a master of weapons.

Zagreus said nothing, drinking as an excuse for the silence, even though he couldn’t taste any of it. Food and drink had lost its lustre weeks ago.

‘What you’re implying,’ Achilles said, shaking his head. ‘Well, yes, in the mortal realm, there are mortal appetites and some of them are cruel. But once exalted, many of those appetites fall away, I believe. The shades in Elysium don’t- Lad, _Zagreus,_ did something happen?’

_The shades in Elysium don’t…_

Don’t do that sort of thing?

Did that mean it really was his fault? That his combination of boons that he’d greedily accepted from Aphrodite and Dionysus had done this? His blind self-satisfaction with his own power as it synchronised with theirs; he’d created the situation and then had to live through it. Asterius had _warned_ him.

Zagreus felt sick.

‘No, of course you’re right,’ Zagreus said, feeling like he swallowed the same mouthful of ale several times before it finally went down. ‘Of course. I’m sorry for upsetting you.’

Achilles stood too, the movement fluid and swift. He reached out like he wanted to place a hand on Zagreus’ forearm before he pulled back.

‘Please,’ Achilles said. ‘As someone who has spent too long alone before finding what I needed in this afterlife. Don’t do the same. If not me, then talk to someone. The people here care for you, lad.’

‘I know,’ Zagreus said. ‘It’s really not so bad here after all is it?’ He laughed, but the sound was strained, and he beat a hasty exit back to his room. Thankfully, no one followed him.

He played the lyre until he leaned heavily against it, tired and feeling like he’d been wounded at some point during the day. But his body was hale, his exhaustion seemed to have no real cause behind it. He walked over to his bed and laid down, trying not to think about how the only person he had to blame was himself, his own hubris.

He could never talk to his father about this.

He already knew what his father would say. He could almost imagine the exact tone the judgement would be delivered in:

_Fool. Have I not warned you long enough that what you do is dangerous? You have no one but yourself to blame, and you’ll get no sympathy from me. Learn from it, and do better next time._

Uncomfortably, the voice in his head was often his father’s at moments like this, and he did not wish to hear it aloud when he already heard it enough times each day.

*

The urge to fling himself into Tartarus over and over again only to die there passed, but the energy to somehow serve the House never vanished. He was his father’s son, it turned out, and he wanted to _work._ But he couldn’t simply walk up to Hades and ask to do the paperwork that was always so tedious it bored him to the point of tears. He wasn’t born to carry the dying home like Thanatos, and he wasn’t tasked with punishing murderers and rapists and the treasonous – among the many others – like the Furies. Even Dusa didn’t need any help.

Everyone had their place, from Nyx, to even Persephone, who found a role as a wife and confidante, the one who softened and unified the House. Without her, everything was colder, as though she brought the spring with her on her heels. Where every one of Zagreus’ footsteps singed the hardy ground beneath him, she brought a blossoming and turned their world into growth.

He loved her endlessly for it. How amazing, he used to think, that he was related to her, that he was her son.

He retreated to her underworld garden while she was away. A small tributary flowed from the Styx at the rear where no one seemed to visit, creating little streamlets and creeks that trickled and chuckled in the way that water could. Trust Persephone to make the water sound lively here, in the House of Hades.

Zagreus found a bench carved in the shape of Pegasus, its pale stone legs bent beneath it so that its back presented a smooth, long area to rest upon. The bench was aged, but beautifully made. Two blue topazes rested in its eyes, and its mane and tail glittered with gems. As Zagreus sat on it, his hand stroked down the mane and he felt it seemed particularly whimsical for the House of Hades.

Perhaps it was stolen.

But he sat there, exhausted despite days spent doing nothing. He stared at the water beneath the giant pomegranate trees, branches bowed from fruits far larger than what could be found in the mortal realm under the same name. His mother’s garden.

It felt, somehow, more peaceful than being around his mother.

*

That was where Hades found him, two days later, when Zagreus had retreated there once more. Zagreus felt his heavy, giant presence first in a prickling of the skin of his shoulders and arms. That was what his father was like, not quite the same overwhelming staticky feeling of Zeus, but rousing all the same.

‘I commissioned that bench for your mother,’ Hades said after some minutes had passed, silence between the two of them. ‘She always wished to ride the winged horse.’

‘So you gave her a way to do it,’ Zagreus said, his hand resting on the mane as it often did. ‘That’s almost sentimental, for you, father.’

‘Yes, well,’ Hades said.

More silence, as though the darkness had opened up and was letting itself drip heavily into the world around them. Zagreus could have sworn that even the water sounded muffled when his father was around.

He had no word for the guilt that ate through his insides. Guilt that he had no patience for, but couldn’t seem to do away with.

_Oh trust me, I know more than anyone that I’m not fulfilling my duties to the house, Father. You need not tell me, I don’t want to hear it. I can’t._

‘I used to come here all the time, when she left,’ Hades said after clearing his throat. ‘And then, I could not come here at all. That she turned part of this land into a garden is a miracle unto itself. She does not see it that way.’

‘It comes naturally to her,’ Zagreus said quietly.

‘It does.’

‘What comes naturally to you?’ Zagreus said, continuing the conversation in spite of himself. He turned and looked over his shoulder, and Hades wasn’t looking at him, but watching the little streamlets himself, a pensive expression on his face.

‘Judgement,’ Hades said swiftly. ‘Accountability.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Zagreus said, smiling a little. ‘She makes gardens that ease the soul, and you judge her for it.’

‘That’s _not-’_ Hades huffed, then sighed. ‘You just can’t help yourself, can you?’

‘I can’t, it seems. Trust me, sometimes I wish I could.’

‘Yes. I suspect there are words we have uttered that we both wish we could withdraw after the fact.’

That was quite the concession, as far as conversations with his father went. Zagreus almost thought he could read between the lines. Was his father trying to tell him to get back out there and do his job? Or trying to tell him it was okay that he _wasn’t_ doing that? But even thinking on that made Zagreus’ heart heavy, and his hand dropped from the mane of Pegasus. He rested it on the bench instead.

‘Achilles requested an audience with me,’ Hades said finally. A chill moved through Zagreus’ body. ‘Which is most unlike him. In fact, he only tends to request audience with me when he has something to talk about regarding you.’

‘Right,’ Zagreus said.

‘He won’t betray your confidence, yet I feel the meeting was not a waste of my time. You are…unwell.’

‘We’ve talked about this,’ Zagreus said abruptly, standing. He didn’t want to talk about any of it. ‘And I don’t need to hear the many ways that you’ll _judge_ me for the reasons I’m behaving this way. I can do it myself, thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’

Hades side-stepped directly into Zagreus’ path; arms folded.

‘Do _not_ take that tone with me, boy,’ Hades growled. Zagreus glared at him. ‘You think you can judge yourself better than I can? You have not the first idea how to go about it, and if this is the outcome of your own self-judgement, then you’re not performing the work well enough.’

‘If you think-’

_‘Silence.’_

Which was what Zagreus had wanted all along, actually, and turned out to be the one thing his father wasn’t giving him. His breath was shallow, choked up somewhere near his collarbones, and he knew his father could see it. There was some kind of desperation in his father’s eyes which wasn’t something Zagreus wanted to see, either.

Then, his father’s shoulders lowered an inch, he looked away from Zagreus. It was a rare concession.

‘At least you’re taking Achilles into your confidence,’ Hades said. ‘I’d rather you talked to someone.’

‘He doesn’t know anything,’ Zagreus said abruptly, and he couldn’t tell why he was so angry. It fired through him, the ground hissing angrily beneath his feet as it scalded further. ‘I asked him a philosophical question and he took it out of context. Whatever conclusions he drew are his own.’

Zagreus pushed past his father and walked away, and he heard the sound that was Hades drawing a breath about to say something – judgemental, no doubt – but in the end the silence that his father had commanded fell heavily upon the garden.

*

The next time Zagreus visited his mother’s garden, a few days later, his father was already there, sitting on the bench carved in the likeness of Pegasus. Well, Zagreus had never met the winged horse, he didn’t know how accurate it was. Likely his father and the shades who made the bench didn’t know either.

‘Great,’ Zagreus said, ‘well, now that you’ve decided to take my spot, I’ll go find somewhere else to occupy myself.’

‘Your _spot?’_ Hades said, with a kind of amused archness. ‘You are not the first to have moodily sat here by the Styx’s tributaries, boy. Trust me on that.’

The idea of his father sitting on that horse – looking like he was about to crush it – stooped over himself and sulking about Persephone having gone, was both hilarious and depressing. Zagreus didn’t know how to react.

‘Feeling moody then, are you?’ Zagreus said finally.

‘Waiting for you,’ Hades said, turning slightly. ‘Zagreus.’

‘Great.’ Zagreus rolled his eyes. ‘You know, you don’t have to do this. You’ve already done the whole redemption thing, haven’t you? You don’t need to put yourself through it again. We all know that you _really_ meant to try your best but were so overworked and missed Persephone so much that you just couldn’t help but be an ass. And now that you have her back, you’ve managed to find your thread of… well, I suppose it’s not humanity, is it? This is tedious, father.’

‘I think you get that from me,’ Hades said speculatively, tilting his head like Zagreus was suddenly fascinating. Zagreus resisted the urge to squirm.

‘What?’ Zagreus said, annoyed.

‘When there is something we don’t wish to discuss, we both have a habit of becoming scathing in defence, in the hopes that it will create an argument instead. That might be the safer ground for both of us.’

‘Is that what I’m doing?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hades said. ‘Is it?’

‘Don’t you have work to be getting back to?’

‘The work will never end, bo- Zagreus,’ Hades said. ‘But like I said, I’m making time.’

It was tempting to curse in his father’s name, but he couldn’t do that in front of him. And it was tempting to curse by the names of the Olympians, but he didn’t want to raise the genuine ire of his father. Instead, he thought fervently: _Fuck._

‘Since you already understand I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t understand why you’re still here.’

‘Far be it for you to assume that you only get your stubbornness from your mother’s side,’ Hades said, almost blandly. ‘But I’ve heard tell that I can be stubborn too.’

Zagreus ground his teeth together.

‘It is not as though you gave me an inch when I demanded you stop talking about _her,_ did you?’ Hades said, and Zagreus was grateful he didn’t sound _too_ smug. ‘Not as though you have given me a moment’s rest in the past few years. Am I supposed to do the same when I am concerned for my son? Am I supposed to walk away, and pretend I do not see that he is suffering?’

‘You think you’re going to help allay that, do you?’ Zagreus said, his anger striking inside him like a hammer upon an anvil, a shower of sparks going everywhere in his mind. ‘You think _you’re_ the one who’s going to be able to help me, do you? And not make everything worse? Like you always do? It’s the only thing you’ve ever been good for, at least when it comes to us, and don’t pretend otherwise.’

Hades’ shoulders stiffened, and Zagreus half-expected – hoped – that he would leap up in umbrage and yell or rush out. Instead he stayed there, tense, by the little streams of Styx, under those giant pomegranates. After a few minutes, Zagreus realised he’d…hurt his father.

‘I have to go,’ Zagreus said, walking away.

_Even though I have nowhere to be._

For once he owed his father an apology, and he didn’t like the feeling.

*

The House of Hades had two modes. The first was that it always seemed to stay the same. Everyone in their rightful place, and it could stay that way for millennia, if need be. Time passed, small changes happened, but nothing truly _changed._

The second mode – the one that Zagreus was most familiar with because he was the one that had been responsible for it at least as often as Persephone had been – was when the gods and beings of the House bent their will towards an outcome, and _change_ happened. Nothing would ever be the same again.

And, it seemed, with so many in the House bending their will towards wanting to find out what happened to Zagreus, he could feel the tendrils of change brushing against him, cloying and threatening. He took to escaping the House of Hades not to find the mortal realm and join the Olympians like the good old days, but simply to get away.

‘Between hell and…another hell,’ Zagreus remarked drily, as he jumped out of the House and fled with Daedalus’ blessing on his shield.

Dying was oblivion. It hurt in the moment, and then it was nothing at all. It didn’t feel violating, it didn’t take anything from him, because his life – at least as far as he had one – was always returned to him. There was nothing death could take from him that wasn’t returned.

That, he realised, was the difference between dying so often, and what those exalted monsters had done to him in Elysium. Somehow, _that_ was the difference.

Something had been taken.

He didn’t know what it was. He couldn’t get it back.

*

Thanatos was waiting for him in his room, sitting on the chaise longue, gazing into the Mirror like he was seeing something quite different to what was actually there. His expression was pensive, but that was nothing out of the ordinary for him. Still, Zagreus was wary as he stepped into his room and thought that it might be worth investing in a _door._ The House Contractor never seemed to offer him one as an option.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ Thanatos said.

Zagreus would normally know what to say, at a moment like this, but instead he simply stood there and felt like a stranger. Was Thanatos here so that they could be with one another? Because Zagreus hadn’t been able to think about _that_ for a long time.

Meg and Than hadn’t pressured him to do anything, but sometimes they didn’t approach him for weeks or months anyway. Time just moved differently, in the House.

‘I was thinking about what it is, to be a mortal,’ Thanatos said, somewhat moodily. ‘Not that I confess to ever really understanding it, beyond my general observations. But I’ve been trying, Zag, to figure out any way to understand what you’ve been going through. You’re not mortal either, of course, but you have… Well, there’s something about you, anyway. Something that seems almost mortal, at times.’

‘Are you all enjoying talking about this while I’m not around?’ Zagreus said, unable to help himself. ‘I’m getting tired of this being all anyone mentions to me anymore. Something wrong with Zag, better fix it so that things can go back to the way they always were.’

‘I think we’re well past that,’ Than said, smiling a little. ‘I don’t think things are going back to the way they were any time soon.’

‘No?’ Zagreus said, his voice smaller than before.

‘No,’ Than sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Zag, for what it’s worth. I wish I knew some way to…better help you. I wish you knew some way to…allow that.’

‘So do I,’ Zagreus said eventually.

‘We don’t talk about this behind your back. Or, well, maybe they do. I’m hardly here. Meg is worried, Zag, but much of what she communicates is in glances. Your father would hardly confide in me. Hypnos isn’t speaking of it at all.’

‘What?’ Zagreus said.

‘He won’t speak of it at all,’ Than said, frowning.

‘But he doesn’t know anything. Aside from that I’ve perhaps been…a bit stranger lately.’

‘I thought-’ Than frowned. ‘I must have been mistaken. Anyway.’ A long silence. ‘Anyway, I’ve- I’ve missed your company. I just wanted to be here for a time. We don’t have to do anything. Is that all right?’

‘Yes,’ Zagreus said, sagging into the chair opposite the chaise longue. ‘I’m not much for good company these days.’

‘You can let me decide that,’ Than said, that classic wry smile on his face. He leaned against the chaise longue, one leg crossed over the other at the knee, and they watched each other quietly until Than’s eyes sank shut. Zagreus’ eyes did the same, and when he woke, he was alone in his room at the table, but the lighter blanket from the storage chest near his bed was draped over his shoulders.

He pressed his hand to it and sighed. He felt more settled than he had for weeks.

*

Instead of going to Hypnos, he went to the Administrative Chamber, and then to the Security Logs. He flipped back through each of his recent escape attempts, some with commentary, some without. He knew the commentary was attended to, in part, by Hypnos.

And there, his last death in Elysium, there was one comment:

_Felled by the worst spear of all._

Zagreus stared at it, then slammed the Security Log shut.

It wasn’t exactly clear enough that anyone might be able to interpret it, and yet anyone with a mind for metaphor would understand exactly what it meant. He stared around the room, as though all the shades knew what had happened to him. But they were working as usual.

So then he went to Hypnos.

‘You _know_ ,’ he said, as Hypnos stared blearily at him, holding a clipboard in his hand.

Hypnos, for once, didn’t say anything at all.

‘You weren’t supposed to know,’ Zagreus said.

‘I didn’t for a while!’ Hypnos said, staring at his clipboard. ‘I was catching up on my backlog! Sometimes I’m not here to pay attention to things, and you know, this is an important job! And since you helped me to learn how to get on top of my tasks, I actually get on top of them. Thanks again for that, Zagreus!’

_Bully for me._

‘Have you told anyone?’ Zagreus said. _‘Don’t_ tell anyone.’

‘I think if I had told anyone, you’d probably know about it by now,’ Hypnos said, his eyes rolling to the giant empty throne where his father usually sat. ‘Don’t you think?’ And then he yawned hugely. ‘Besides! You’ve died so many times. I stopped sharing all the different ways it can happen with people years ago, y’know? So no one…’ Hypnos’ gaze was suddenly sharp when he looked at Zagreus, ‘would ever expect me to tell them about that one, would they?’

Zagreus’ chest clenched. This was _not_ something he wanted Hypnos knowing. _At all._ Hypnos didn’t watch his mouth at the best of times and yet… And yet…

Here he was, keeping Zagreus’ secret so well that even Zagreus hadn’t known.

Maybe Hypnos didn’t care. Maybe the act of it didn’t impact them the way it impacted mortals. Zagreus had wondered that himself many times.

And yet the words in the Security Log had been clear: _Felled by the worst spear of all._

They weren’t the words of someone who thought what happened was unimportant.

‘Wow! You just never make it out of Asphodel these days, do you?’ Hypnos said, staring at his clipboard like he was seeing all the recent deaths there. ‘Just _never,_ not even _a little._ It’s almost like you’re not _trying_ anymore. It’s different to just taking a break because you want a holiday, isn’t it? That’s not fun at all! I don’t know. Seems a shame I can’t say something to fix things for you! But keep your chin up, Zagreus! I’m sure something will help!’

And that seemed to be the end of the conversation because Hypnos sank down onto his own chaise longue – the one that Zagreus had organised to be made especially for him – and fell immediately and deeply asleep.

A few hours later, Zagreus rested on his bed. Alongside his horror that someone knew, was a strange warm relief.

Someone knew.

They didn’t hate him for it.

For some reason, that seemed very important.

*

He rested on the Pegasus bench and watched little silvery gupps in the small streamlets. They moved in little schools, back and forth, catching the otherworldly light. Zagreus was impressed by sunrises and sunsets, having seen them now, but he loved the light here. Maybe one day he’d tell his father that.

It wouldn’t be today, even though he could hear his father approaching.

Hades stood nearby, arms folded, and he looked out into the shadowy stone-and-forest gloom at the wilder back end of the garden.

‘I have to say,’ Zagreus said, ‘I appreciate that you’re not simply storming into my room every day.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Hades said stiffly.

‘I didn’t say thank you.’

‘And yet, that is what I heard,’ Hades said.

Zagreus laughed softly. He leaned heavily against the bowed head of the Pegasus, the stone of its mane comfortable, despite the little twinkling diamonds. He couldn’t understand his exhaustion. He wasn’t _doing_ anything.

‘I am beginning to think that you have taken a leaf out of my book,’ Hades said. ‘I talked to no one of your mother, once she left. It was too… And there was much to be done. When you opened that door, I hated you for it. But you, too, have a closed door within you, Zagreus, and I would rather you hate me for trying to open it, than continue like this.’

‘Come on, I’m not that bad now, am I?’ Zagreus said. ‘We’re not even fighting anymore.’

‘Zagreus,’ his father said, like he was disappointed.

‘You can’t change anything,’ Zagreus said, frustrated. ‘This isn’t like what happened with mother, where you close a door out of grief, but it turns out the future _can_ be changed. What happened… What happened to me…’

That was far too close to the truth, those words. That acknowledgement.

_What happened to me…_

‘It can’t be undone,’ Zagreus said. ‘That’s that. There’s no place for you to run to in Olympus or any mortal realm to fix this. I doubt you’d go anyway.’

‘You might be surprised,’ Hades muttered. ‘What happened to you?’

_Nothing, father._

Zagreus stared at the gupps. A larger school had formed now, and were all trying to hide in the lee of a little stone. They weren’t quite managing it. Eventually all the outliers formed another, smaller school of fish and went to hide in the hollow under a bank instead, disappearing.

‘There are very few things I can think of in this world that would impact you so sorely,’ Hades said. ‘And many of those things are impossible.’

Zagreus made a face. That was what Achilles had intimated, wasn’t it? That the shades in Elysium usually wouldn’t… do what they’d done. It was Zagreus’ choice to take on those boons, Zagreus’ choice to get cocky and ignore the warning signs.

‘But if they weren’t impossible…’ Hades said.

Something in the air seemed to change. It came on the back of whatever Hades had realised. Zagreus turned back to look at him, saw the sudden fear on his face.

‘No,’ Hades said abruptly, glowering at nothing. ‘They are impossible.’

‘There are many things in the world that you thought were impossible,’ Zagreus said, hating that he wasn’t letting this lie. ‘And yet your wife is home with you, and you are reconciled with your brother, and your family, and no one went to war for the fact of my existence, or your love of Persephone.’

‘And if such impossibilities exist, then others might as well,’ Hades said, almost philosophically.

It was the longest and most civil conversation they’d ever had. Zagreus almost wanted to throw some confetti in the air.

But after that, Hades stood in silence, and Zagreus wanted to sleep. He’d come to enjoy it. The longer-death. The one where he didn’t awaken in the Styx, but in sheets that were soft. How he’d changed.

‘Zagreus,’ Hades said, his voice heavy and sober. ‘If anyone has hurt you, beyond what is expected as you escape, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’

_Why would I tell you?_

Zagreus looked back at his father, then lifted a hand in a lazy shrug. Hades grimaced.

‘You _would_ tell me,’ Hades said.

‘Why?’ Zagreus said. He felt like a teenager. Like a child. He didn’t even understand why he was baiting his _father,_ of all people.

But Hades didn’t rise to the bait, and Zagreus closed his eyes and turned away. There was nothing to say.

Another few minutes passed, and then the heavy steps of his father walking up to him. Zagreus didn’t outwardly stiffen, but he was tense all the same, holding his breath. He never knew what to expect. They shared more affection and camaraderie trying to slaughter each other than they ever did the rest of the time.

He flinched at the hand on his shoulder, but it was gentle, surprisingly warm. And Zagreus didn’t quite gasp, didn’t quite swallow a breath, didn’t have a word for the way his lungs couldn’t handle what was happening. Hades’ hand was broad. Zagreus knew what it felt like around his throat, and he knew what it felt like wielding Gigaros against him, and he knew what it felt like in a myriad of different ways that weren’t at all like this moment.

His father’s hand on his shoulder, resting there, _still._

‘I can’t quite tell what you’re doing,’ Zagreus said finally, feeling stupid.

Hades drew a breath like he was about to speak, but said nothing. His fingers curled slightly, and for a moment Zagreus thought they were a threat, then realised they were a reassurance.

Hades stood there for several long minutes after that, and then withdrew his hand and walked away. Zagreus felt the remnants of that touch on his shoulder long after Hades had left, in the chill that took the place of that warmth, in the strange yearning for that touch to be repeated, and the need to know how to make it happen.

*

He thought he’d been feeling better about it all, but his escape attempts proved him wrong every time. If anything, his fears were getting worse. His nightmares came to him while he was awake, so sleep was often its own escape from the way his mind replayed what had happened with details he hadn’t even been aware of at the time.

After a particularly harrowing journey through Asphodel – more because of his own mind than for any other reason – he ended up back in Persephone’s garden, shaking on that stupid Pegasus bench, his hands pressed to his sternum. He felt like he couldn’t breathe. But the more he focused on it, the worse it became.

When his father approached, his hands turned to fists and he tried to look relaxed, and knew he looked frightened.

He was shocked beyond words when his father sat cross-legged on the grass, leaning back against a tree nearby. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his father sit on the floor like that.

‘There was a rumour about what I did to your mother that circulated among the mortals and the Olympians,’ Hades said grimly. ‘A terrible rumour. I find myself thinking about it lately. Instead of saying that we’d fallen in love, that she came here because she wanted to be here, they said that I abducted her. This much you know, a necessary cover story. But they also said I raped her.’

Zagreus looked at him in shock, and Hades stared quietly back.

‘It was a horrid thing,’ Hades said, ‘and something I could not fight back against, of course, never having the occasion to leave and set matters straight. And so I’m known for something I cannot abide, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

Zagreus wanted to ask if that was changing now that things had changed in the House of Hades. But he dreaded knowing that his father was bringing this up for a _reason._ It took all of Zagreus’ energy in that moment to not interrogate him, to not demand why this was coming up _now._ It took every ounce of his worn will to not simply ask: _Why are you doing this?_

‘I think you know the question I would ask you,’ Hades said, ‘and you don’t want me to ask it.’

‘That would be best, I think,’ Zagreus said, hating that he sounded desperate.

Hades closed his eyes as if pained, and Zagreus did the same a moment later. That was its own admittance after all, wasn’t it? If they were speaking in this code between them, then…

Then his father knew…didn’t he?

‘ _Who?’_ Hades said, a backbone of rage in his voice as promising as a brontide.

Zagreus stood automatically. He didn’t want to be around _that._

And not _who,_ anyway, but how _many_. A question Zagreus couldn’t answer. It was too humiliating.

‘Zagreus,’ Hades said, when Zagreus started to leave. ‘Wait.’

‘We’re not doing this.’

‘Yes, I gathered. Wait.’

‘We’re _never_ doing this,’ Zagreus said, turning. ‘I already know what you think of me, I don’t need that to get _worse._ You might find it tedious having to look down on your only son, but imagine how it is for me, all right? I know you can’t help but feel disappointed in me, but I’m not about to give you more reasons for it if I can help it.’

His father stared at him like a man betrayed. Zagreus could have screamed, but instead stood there, arms by his sides, wishing he could feel the calm he almost conveyed.

‘This isn’t…’ Zagreus started, and then stopped, dragging his hand through his hair. ‘This isn’t something you can fix by just going off to enact revenge on someone.’

_I don’t even know which ones they were. I don’t know if I’d recognise them, and I certainly don’t want to give them the chance to recognise me._

‘If someone in this House has hurt you,’ Hades said, his voice rumbling with threat.

_‘No one_ in this House has hurt me,’ Zagreus said. ‘Your House isn’t the problem. Everyone here is fine, all right? Well, okay, someone could tell the Wretched Broker not to rort me so often with his prices, but everyone here is _fine.’_

‘Then it was one of the Olympians!’ Hades roared, standing up with a speed that belied his size. ‘ _Which one?!’_

Zagreus stared at him, then pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, then walked away. It was only at the entrance of the garden that he heard his father calling after him, and he shook his head.

No. He was tired. His father would never understand. His shades weren’t meant to be capable of it, his father hated the act itself, and eventually he would realise that it was Zagreus’ fault. The weight of that was heavy enough, without his father leaning on it too.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve added suicidal ideation as a tag, though death works far differently in Hades’ realm than it does elsewhere. Meanwhile, it's finally here! This update was slowed by brain weasels, and then having to evacuate home due to an out of control bushfire (it's out now, thank goodness). Hopefully I've made up for it by this chapter being longer than the other two, and I hope you enjoy the end of this story! Thank you so much for reading. :) You can find me on [Tumblr](https://not-poignant.tumblr.com/)
> 
> *
> 
> Sometimes healing isn’t complete, but at least you have hope that it will be ongoing.

Dusa appeared in his bedroom, nervously hanging in his doorway, her serpents more agitated than usual.

‘Ah- E-excuse me, I don’t mean to be a bother or anything but, b-but I’ve just been instructed to polish G-Gigaros so that it can be used to go fight the- the _Olympians?_ Something about-? He-he wouldn’t say _exactly._ But everyone knows you – and I’m- I’m sure you had your reasons! – walked out on him and that they might be… _connected?’_

That was how Zagreus found himself sprinting past Dusa and dashing as fast as he could to his father’s rooms, because for some reason – stupid, he knew what his father was like – he hadn’t put together that the yelling of before might actually lead to something like a _war._

He burst into his father’s room, door slamming shut behind him, only to see Hades in the kind of get-up he usually wore before he was about to try and slaughter Zagreus.

‘Firstly,’ Zagreus said, ‘ _what_ are you doing? Secondly, given I’ve killed _you_ enough times in a row, you’d almost be better off sending me up there to do your bidding instead. What were you going to do? Just go up there and start picking off your _family members?’_

‘If they’ve- They are no family members of mine after something like this!’

His father’s voice was so loud, Zagreus swore the walls were shaking.

Zagreus stood there, staring at his father, who was willing to go to war after all the hard work all of them had done to make things right between everyone. He had no words for the combination of anger, dismay and something sneakily like relief burning through him.

‘You can’t do this,’ Zagreus said. ‘It had nothing to do with them. At least. Not- Not in any way they’re aware of.’

‘Given you’re being so _evasive,_ I shall go up there and question them _myself,’_ Hades said, and Zagreus was torn between the fear he felt that he’d set this chain reaction off in the first place, and rolling his eyes.

‘Oh, stop it, father,’ Zagreus said. ‘The last thing anyone needs – that I need – is for you to- Leave them out of this!’

‘Was it a human?’ Hades said abruptly. ‘A human…when you went to the mortal realm? But _how?’_

‘Stop this!’ Zagreus shouted, his hands clenching into fists, the rug beneath his feet singeing. A familiar scent of acrid smoke clouded up briefly around him, and he forced himself to take a deep breath. He and his father sighed at exactly the same time, and Zagreus looked at Hades in surprise. ‘Why do you need to know _who?’_

‘So I can _punish_ them! What do you think my role is, here? It is the only thing I can do!’

For some reason that, more than anything else, felt like it struck Zagreus down in place. For a second, his father’s words flew inside him, like stones skipping endlessly across a river. When they sank down, he felt heavy and tired. He cast about the room, and ended up sitting at the large chair that his father used when he did whatever he did in this room. Zagreus didn’t know. Even now that he had access to the space, he still hardly knew how his father lived in private.

Of course his father would see it that way. Of course he’d think it was his responsibility to find the transgressors and punish them. And then likely, by his thinking, the problem would be over.

Zagreus wanted it to be true more than anything. A perfect world would be one in which all those shades that hurt him could be found, destroyed, and he could erase the whole thing from his mind and go on living as he used to.

But he was different, and he didn’t think he could go back to how it was. It was as much an impossibility as pretending he’d never met his mother, Persephone. As much of an impossibility as forgetting all of the Olympians he’d befriended. There was no existence where he would magically become who he used to be because there were some acts that were too ruinous for that.

The realisation hit him freshly, a despairing knowledge that his father wanted to fix it, and Zagreus knew it couldn’t be fixed.

‘Boy, what is it?’ Hades said.

‘It wasn’t any of the Olympians,’ Zagreus said. ‘It wasn’t a human. It wasn’t anyone in the House. If it were something I thought you could… Will you just promise me not to start any inter-realm wars? You’ve killed enough of your own family members already.’

‘The Titans deserved it,’ Hades said darkly, and then stepped backwards and sat heavily on his bed. It didn’t even creak beneath him.

‘I was thinking of me, actually, but we can include them too, if you want,’ Zagreus said

‘You’ve killed _me_ more times than I’ve killed _you,’_ Hades said, faintly indignant.

‘Yes, well- But you…’

_You started it._

Zagreus raised his hand to his forehead. He wanted to be angry with his father. It was familiar. It was one of the few familiar things he had left to him, and his father was making it difficult. Pretty consistently ruining it by being not as terrible as Zagreus kept expecting him to be. It wasn’t fair, yet was preferrable, all at the same time.

‘You know, sometimes you’re very annoying,’ Zagreus said.

‘That must be where _you_ get it from,’ Hades said, unblinking, staring like the great God of the Underworld that he was.

‘No,’ Zagreus said. ‘I have it on good authority that I am never annoying.’

Hades’ mouth did something that was almost a lip quirk that was _almost_ a smile, but Zagreus was sure he’d imagined it.

‘I am the ultimate authority in this House, boy, and I’m inclined to disagree,’ Hades said. Then, under his breath, he added: ‘Zagreus.’

‘So we’re good?’ Zagreus said. ‘You’re not about to go kill my _grandmother_ or something, because you’re angry?’

Hades said nothing, then nodded once. But he also didn’t look away, and his gaze was heavy, a weight against Zagreus’ entire body. It was a gaze that was grave, that reminded Zagreus that he couldn’t joke like this with his father without remembering what happened to him in Elysium. The few seconds of respite that he’d found felt like they’d never existed.

Reality wiggled into him with the same callous insensitivity as those shades in Elysium.

‘Right,’ Zagreus said, sighing, looking away. ‘Well. That’s good, then.’

He walked away.

‘Zagreus,’ Hades said, and Zagreus paused and looked over his shoulder.

They looked at each other for a long time, and then Hades shook his head and seemed, somehow, defeated.

Zagreus went back to his room, and no one talked again of going to war with the Olympians.

*

He stopped going to Tartarus entirely. In some ways, he missed it. Death was predictable, there was an ease to it after the pain and sometimes the fear. Unlike humans, he was made for the experience, understanding that it was a temporary affliction. Enough time had passed that he felt it was a form of relief. Without it, he found he craved oblivion, and sometimes sat by the bar and thought of drinking himself insensate.

But that reminded him too much of the drunken feeling of being high on Dionysus’ and Aphrodite’s boons, and he was surprised to discover that he’d become scared of feeling drunk in a way he wasn’t even scared of death.

One quiet, dark time by the bar, Megaera came over to him. She had the most spectacular resting facial expression, he’d always loved it. Even as a child, she always looked a like she’d tasted something sour. But her eyes were compassionate, even soft. He doubted any of her victims saw that side of her.

‘Zagreus,’ she said quietly, by way of greeting.

‘Meg,’ Zagreus said.

She sat beside him on a stool, watching the Head Chef shade expertly filleting a fish. He didn’t know where the fish had come from, since he hadn’t been providing them. But maybe the Head Chef froze them for a time, or they could stay fresh in some kind of underworld stasis chamber Zagreus didn’t know anything about. The magic here was innate and trusted, it offered some things with ease and other things not at all. Such was the way of the Underworld.

They were silent for some time, then Meg tilted her head and looked up at the ceiling. After a while, her eyes were drawn to the garish skull mirror-ball that Zagreus had installed what felt like years ago. When she turned back to him, there was a slight smile at one corner of her mouth. He returned it, helplessly. He’d always had a soft spot for her.

‘Miss you,’ she said finally. ‘In Tartarus.’

Zagreus didn’t know what to say, and after a while she ran her hand up and down the handle of her whip. It was a nervous gesture, though when he was in a mood to be debauched, it was also a promising gesture.

‘Miss you here too,’ she said, looking up at him. ‘Won’t you come back to us?’

‘I don’t know how.’

‘The only love I know is tough love,’ she said, her voice scratching over the words, as though it pained her to say them. ‘Tough on you. Tough on me. On everyone.’

‘It’s not that tough,’ Zagreus said, smiling in concession. ‘You’re hard on yourself, Meg.’

‘See?’ she said, smiling fully now, the transformation always causing Zagreus’ heart to skip a beat. ‘Tough love.’

‘You’ve always been cleverer than me,’ Zagreus said.

‘Zag, I want to help,’ she said, abandoning the banter. ‘We all do. I look around this House and think… Was it always like this? Did we never know how to help you?’

‘That’s not it, you know that’s not true,’ Zagreus said firmly. ‘And it’s not like I’m helping matters myself. I don’t know how to let anyone…in, really.’

He laughed because it was embarrassing to admit.

‘But isn’t that the problem?’ Meg said, faintly insistent. ‘Isn’t that something you’d know, if the House had been different?’

Zagreus looked at her in surprise. ‘Meg…’

‘Tough love from me, your father, Than, even Nyx sometimes, you know what she can be like. She’s the night, she’s made of darkness. Hypnos is soft, but we all thought he was stupid for it. He played up to that.’

‘He did,’ Zagreus said slowly, thinking of the knowing way that Hypnos looked at him sometimes.

‘I don’t know how to be soft,’ Meg said, looking haunted.

‘If it helps,’ Zagreus said, ‘I don’t know how to accept it.’

They both looked at each other, and then the smile-grimace that they both fell into seemed natural and easy, and the next few hours went by in silent companionship, watching the Head Chef, who was only occasionally flustered by their presence.

It felt, somehow, softer.

*

He found himself drawn to the library, an endlessness of scrolls and books, and perused stories about Dionysus and Aphrodite. He was looking for evidence that he wasn’t the first, that he hadn’t created the issue himself. He learned that humans were capable of coming up with infinite ways to celebrate and worship the gods. He learned many versions of the same things he already knew, or had been told directly by the gods themselves. He learned that humans were great storytellers, fabricating nonsense out of thin air.

There, on the bottom shelf, was a series of illustrated scrolls and very thin books. One, that looked like it could be no longer than about fifteen pages, was titled: _Passionflower._

Reading it, Zagreus’ heart beat faster. It was an accounting of a priestess who felt slighted by both Aphrodite and Dionysus because they never responded to her many, many bitter and cynical offerings. She believed she loved them both equally, but she was so corrupted that she was unable to feel the emotion. When neither looked down upon her, she became powerful enough to curse them.

_Whomsoever receives the bountiful love that was supposed to be bestowed on me, will know suffering like no other, and learn that these beautiful beings did not deserve your appeals from the beginning._

There were no details of what the suffering would entail. The story ended soon after, stating that temples dedicated to the worship of both Dionysus and Aphrodite – for love and lust and madness and inebriation all went hand in hand – were destroyed, due to the effects of the curse that attacked not the gods themselves, but the humans that dared love them both and received blessings for it.

Zagreus’ heart raced now. He took the book back to his bedroom and left it on the floor beside his bed.

It didn’t make him feel any less guilty. He was learning that whatever storm happened inside of him turned anything useful into a sodden mess. He was endlessly distracted by the lightning strikes of the memories that flashed within. No matter what he tried, those shades lived inside him, somehow violating him even when he was doing something utterly mundane, like making his bed so that Dusa wouldn’t have to.

*

He began sitting by the little creek in his mother’s garden again, after avoiding it for a few weeks after the argument he’d had with his father.

A few days later, his father started joining him again.

Most of their time together was spent in complete silence. At first awkward, and then companionable, as Zagreus got to see a side of his father not endlessly invested in work, nor scolding someone. For a long time, that was all he’d known of his father. An angry man doomed to work, unhappy if no one else was doing the same.

As they sat, one gloomy day – or night, it was impossible to tell in the endlessness of the Underworld – Zagreus wondered if the passionflower curse was permanent. He had no doubt that’s what had happened to him. But maybe it wasn’t permanent, no one else had tried to hurt him that way, and certainly he’d already experienced suffering like nothing he’d known before, because of it.

The curse was effective, he couldn’t see himself wanting to combine boons from Aphrodite and Dionysus ever again.

He felt satisfied with his line of reasoning, yet he still couldn’t bear the thought of going back to Elysium. He thought those shades might remember him, might be driven to hurt him again in that specific way.

With time away from being constantly injured, hurt, lacerated, and blown up, he realised he wasn’t looking forward to experiencing that again either. There was a time when it all filled him with the same kind of thrill. How it felt to get to the mortal realm, bleeding and half-destroyed, knowing that he’d be reborn, refreshed and made anew.

There was something in him now that would never be reborn.

‘I’m surprised you’re not yelling at me more for not working,’ Zagreus said eventually, when an hour had passed, and he’d gotten tired of his own thoughts.

Hades stared not at the water, but past it, as though he was looking at the ruined statues beyond. He held a single pomegranate, a tiny thing in his giant palm, though the fruits were much larger than any Zagreus had seen even in his mother’s mortal realm garden. After a while, Hades looked at Zagreus, expression pensive.

‘For most of my life I believed myself to be incapable of any meaningful change,’ Hades said, turning the pomegranate in his hands. ‘I was never interested in it, I didn’t want it, but sometimes I wondered why it was also impossible. Something about living in the world as the being I am, or maybe something static about the Underworld, something I shared with the ever unchanging shades. Except I wasn’t born to live here, and before I came here, I was…not the same as I am now.’

Zagreus found himself enraptured immediately, because his father almost never opened up to him, and almost never for this long. He talked in short, judgemental sentences, and he didn’t turn a pomegranate in a single hand, and his voice – eloquent but tight – was always turned towards phrases Zagreus rarely wanted to hear.

‘I have always wanted to make peace with my role here,’ Hades said. ‘I believe I very nearly have. Sometimes I look at Nyx, or Persephone, and I believe I have. I looked at you over the past year, and thought I was closer.’

Zagreus swallowed roughly and felt even worse. Great. Now he was ruining his father’s ability to make peace with the Underworld and his role as keeper of the shades, the dead, their paperwork.

He wished he’d known all of this before now. He was angry it had taken this horrible fucking _thing_ to make his father talk to him this way.

_Why?_ he wanted to cry. _Why now? How do you think this is good enough? After all this time? Us constantly trying to kill each other even when we no longer truly wanted to punish each other?_

Well. Sometimes Zagreus did still want to punish his father, but that was another matter.

‘I never wanted to acknowledge that there was a before and an after. Before I came here to live and work and never leave, and an after. Boy, for you it is the same. There is a Before. There is an After.’

Zagreus felt like someone had scooped his breath out of his lungs, and for a moment, he just stopped. When he came back to himself, his father was staring down at the pomegranate and even his giant beard and moustache could not hide the sadness on his face.

‘Yours is not like mine,’ Hades said. ‘Nonetheless, it exists. Once I understood that, I realised I cannot yell at you for this. There is no anger strong enough to rouse you from the After, boy. Not mine at you. And not yours at yourself.’

_And not yours at yourself._

It happened too fast for Zagreus to stop it, the response of his body to those words. Even before his mind could process them, his eyes teared up, and he thought of all the times he’d tried to use anger to batter, bruise, and propel himself into a better reality. He thought of how he clung to it desperately and he thought of how he’d still do it even while his father’s words made it clear it wasn’t likely to be the thing to change everything and make his life go back to the way it was.

His throat closed up and he hurriedly stood.

He walked away. He couldn’t even tell his father that he had to leave. Not without betraying his emotional state. And they were not the kind of family to sit and share emotions like that.

Zagreus reached his room and stood – breaths shaking – by the giant mirror that Nyx had given him. He slapped his hand against it and for a moment wanted nothing more than to break it.

His anger, impotent and raging, encouraged him to shatter it. To ignore what those words meant, how powerful they were, what his father seemed to be offering.

He breathed through the shards of that as much as he breathed through his grief.

After a while, he went through to the weapons chamber, chose the shield, and then stood staring down at the stone floor far below. The one that would lead to Tartarus and the mortal realm above. Tears streamed down his face, and while Skelly taunted him in the background for not leaving – though gently these days, not like before – Zagreus leaned against the stone arch and pulled the shield into his body and wished it would comfort him, wished he could feel like it wasn’t too late to feel happy ever again.

*

There was a Before, and an After. Despite the fact that he hated how those words buried into him, there was a strange comfort in them now. Of course he knew he wasn’t the only one who had gone through life-shaking events, but having his father offer sympathy because of it felt… It felt…

Zagreus grasped around for the word because the one that came to him couldn’t possibly be it.

It felt _kind._

He sat beside the counter, watching the Head Chef, whose knife skills were so great that Zagreus couldn’t help wondering if he was a warrior in his human life. Or perhaps he’d really just been that good of a chef.

He watched the other shades milling about, talking quietly to one another. It occurred to him that some of them had probably died the way he’d died, out there in the battlefield. Unlike him, they didn’t get reborn over and over again, they weren’t immortal. They survived as shades, but it wasn’t the same. But they were cared for, looked after.

Zagreus didn’t really understand them like his father did.

He’d always imagined himself in opposition to this place. He eavesdropped on the shades but he’d never truly cared about them. He never bonded with any when he worked with them in record keeping. Aside from the House Contractor and the Head Chef and the Wretched Broker, and of course, his favourite shade who’d made him the banner in Elysium… Well, he hadn’t bothered to know any of them.

In many ways, he didn’t want to. They were faceless creatures that watched him when he fought his way through the Underworld. When they were assigned tasks and roles, they were beasts that he killed.

And beasts that had raped him.

Yet here, looking at shades quietly huddling together, at once peaceful and mournful and wry, he thought his father had done a good job with this place. He couldn’t profess to ever fully understanding it. He’d always live with one step in the House of Hades, and one step in the mortal realm, burning the grass beneath his feet.

With a sigh, he returned to his room and slept. His mind was so full of thoughts these days, he needed the rest to quieten it.

*

In the end, it wasn’t hard to sit at that bench in the pomegranate garden, while his father picked out little seeds of pomegranate and ate them one by one – ridiculous and delicate and annoying to watch – and say:

‘I was cursed. I took too many boons from Dionysus and Aphrodite, and I think I was cursed as a result. It was some of the shades in Elysium. I’ve never had any problem like that before, and I don’t believe they were capable of something like that until they encountered…the curse. Ultimately, it was my fault. And if I don’t take those boons again, it shall never happen again, and I just need to accept that and move on.’

He didn’t feel much as he said it. Which was strange, because he’d imagined saying fragments of it and each time the mere thought shattered him. Yet now, sitting there, he felt empty and cleaned out.

Hades had gone very still, and Zagreus smiled to himself without looking at him.

‘I await your judgement,’ Zagreus said, with false lightness. ‘Since you so love to judge.’

‘You’ve never understood judgement,’ Hades said after a long silence had passed. ‘Perhaps if you’d not spent so much of your youth earning the side of the scales you didn’t enjoy; you’d understand it better.’

Zagreus rolled his eyes. His father couldn’t help himself sometimes.

‘Boy- Zagreus…’ He stopped talking again, and Zagreus felt his father’s pain and agitation flow into the emptiness in his gut. It was like they were linked by some strange conduit, and Zagreus didn’t want his father to feel stuck because of him, or suffer because of him, or hurt because of him. He’d never much wanted it as a child or a teenager, and while he sought it for a time, he’d made peace with the side of him that needed revenge, that could be vindictive.

Now, they had almost the same camaraderie as Zagreus and Asterius did on the battlefield.

‘Curses do not always fall upon those who deserve them,’ Hades said. ‘This is why they are called curses, not judgements. You have recognised the error you made and you will not make it again. This is why it can be foolish to accept the boons of Olympians. They are not to be trusted.’

‘They didn’t know, I’m sure of it,’ Zagreus said. ‘They’ve helped me all this time. They’re my family.’

Hades made a sound of disgust. Zagreus winced, then looked away. Where the emptiness had been, where Hades’ feelings had followed, Zagreus was starting to feel something broken and wretched instead. Like his bones had been shattered, but deeper. A pain that went beyond pain.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Zagreus said. ‘I can hardly go back. There’s nothing anyone can do.’

‘That is where you are wrong,’ Hades said. ‘Do you not think those tasked with protecting my realm aren’t registered? Cannot be found and held to account? They will be banished, and I will review my House. I am also to be judged, in this.’

Zagreus looked at him, and Hades’ expression was murderous. It was an expression Zagreus knew well, but usually it was directed at him. This time, Hades stared off into the stream, his hand tense around half of one of Persephone’s pomegranates.

‘I don’t really think the answer is for everyone to get mad at themselves. Seems counterproductive,’ Zagreus said, attempting something more light-hearted.

Hades said nothing.

‘And given enough time, I’ll forget about it. After all, it’s just one more…’

Hades was looking at him now, and Zagreus’ words dried up in response to that expression. Worse, he felt _seen_ , somehow. As though his father – his _father_ of all people, dense, emotionally bankrupt and lord of all paperwork – understood, or at the very least, was treating this with a gravity that Zagreus was scared of.

‘Come on,’ Zagreus said nervously. ‘It taught me a lesson, didn’t it? You can’t say you weren’t – at least at some point in my life – hoping something like this would-’

Hades’ expression turned incredulous, he paled behind his facial hair, and he stood abruptly. He’d taken three steps towards the exit before Zagreus realised how deeply he’d offended him.

He ran after him. ‘Wait! I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘Do you really think such a thing of me?’ Hades said.

‘No!’ Zagreus said. ‘I mean, maybe once but- _No,_ of course, it’s just…’

It’s just it was all too easy to imagine his father saying that he deserved it, that he’d brought it on himself, that his cockiness would always be his downfall one day. After all, his father said those things anyway. In Erebus, he’d heard the echo of his father’s mocking laughter when he took a hit, sometimes a bad one, sometimes bleeding copiously to that sound. It wasn’t malicious, it was just the way things were.

‘I don’t think that now,’ Zagreus said eventually.

‘But you did.’ Hades’ voice was heavy and slow. ‘Was this one of the reasons you didn’t tell me sooner? Was this why you were so concerned about my judgement?’

Every one of Hades’ words was a wall building between them, and Zagreus couldn’t take it down.

Hades stared at him for a long time. Then he turned away, presenting his broad back, broad shoulders. He’d always seemed like someone who could carry the entire weight of the Underworld on his back, but Zagreus thought he looked defeated.

‘We are made to be gods,’ Hades said finally, still not looking at Zagreus. ‘Sometimes, even this is not enough.’

He didn’t explain himself further, and he walked slowly away. Zagreus stood there, wishing he could take back what he’d implied, wishing he could remove his father’s hurt, and unsure what to do with both of those instincts.

*

He escaped into Tartarus. He didn’t want to go to Elysium, or even Asphodel. He just needed to get _away._ His father was clearly in a mood, and sometimes cast strange, bleak looks at Zagreus before going back to his work. Thanatos was busy. Persephone asked after Zagreus many times, but he didn’t know how to open up to her. He loved her more than anything, he would lay himself open for her, die for her, but something about what had happened felt like it didn’t belong to her world. Nyx was spending more and more time with Chaos, and sometimes – though Zagreus wasn’t sure how – Ares, as well.

He fought his way to a raised platform that looked out over the Styx. There, he stopped, breathing heavily, resting his shield against the wrought iron railing. He stared into the darkness and thought that actually, it hadn’t been as hard as he thought it would be, to get this far. His skills weren’t as sharp, but nor was he as bad as he had been the first time he’d escaped.

If he wanted to, he could probably make it to Elysium.

But he didn’t want to. Instead he stood with his forearms resting on the rusted metal, and closed his eyes. Sometimes he thought about melodramatic actions, like throwing himself down into the Styx, but he’d just awaken back in his father’s House, and it wouldn’t make any difference. Still, the urge beat away at him. His body wanted to express the way he felt, and it only knew how to do so in dramatic acts. Escape, death, suicide.

His eyes burned. A storm occurred in his body even when it wasn’t occurring in his mind, and he grew so weary of it.

An electric presence behind him, and for a moment he felt a bolt of terror and thought it was an Elysium shade come to find him here, until he heard the unmistakeable steps of his father.

The touch of his father’s palm on his back both helped and tortured him. He had to keep his head bowed because everything hurt too much. What a miracle it was, to have his father behave like this around him. What a price he’d paid to experience it.

‘I…’ Hades began. ‘I am trying.’

‘I know,’ Zagreus said, his voice strained.

‘Come back,’ Hades said.

Zagreus didn’t say anything at all. His forearms moved on the metal, his hands clenched into fists. His eyes were wet, his breathing shallower than before.

‘Come… Come home,’ Hades said.

His hand was huge and warm, and Zagreus preferred knowing it this way. Certainly, when he was lost in bloodlust, it was different. When they were killing each other, it was different, it could even be fun. But right now there was a child within him who mourned never knowing this side of his father while growing up.

‘It shouldn’t have taken _this,_ for you to be- For you to be this way,’ Zagreus choked out.

Hades’ hand shifted, applied a slight pressure that was supposed to be reassuring, but hurt more, splintering through Zagreus’ heart because he didn’t know what to do with reassurance or consolation from his father. His _father,_ of all people.

His head bowed further, his face screwing up.

‘I know,’ Hades said heavily. ‘When you’re ready, we’ll go home.’

Zagreus fought with himself not to sob outright, because he’d never really been that kind of person, and even though he suspected – by some twist of fate – that his father wouldn’t criticise him for it, he couldn’t let himself. So his hands stayed clenched into fists and his shoulders and back stayed tense and his father stood a little behind, a little beside him, and that hand never left his back.

It was like having a protective wall around him.

Time passed and eventually Hades cleared his throat.

‘It may not help to know this, but those shades have been located and destroyed.’

Zagreus’ eyes opened, his vision blurry because of the tears he couldn’t fully will away. ‘Destroyed?’

He sounded like he’d been crying. He was grateful his father didn’t comment on it.

‘Yes. They will…reform in time. This place being what it is. But they’ll never be employed within the realm again. They were too corrupted. You were right, they were cursed. Damn those Olympians, and their actions that led to those curses.’

‘ _I_ chose the boons,’ Zagreus managed. ‘The ones you’ve always had such strong opinions about me accepting in.’

‘If this is a pathetic attempt to get me to blame you for this, you’ll not succeed,’ his father said with some indignance in his voice. ‘I don’t know what you want from me, Zagreus. I cannot be the monster you seem to need me to be. Not in this.’

Zagreus laughed weakly and wetly. ‘All my life, you’ve blamed me for things that weren’t my fault. And then this one thing happens, and suddenly you can’t even-’

Hades grabbed him by the shoulder so hard that Zagreus’ skin bruised. For a moment, he thought he was about to be killed by his father, unprepared and woefully unready.

And then he found himself crushed into his father’s chest, both of Hades’ arms around him, a vague scent of smoke and pomegranates and metal around him. Zagreus was stunned, wide-eyed, and could not react. His words vanished. He was suspended in the shock of his father choosing to do this, choosing to do this _now._

Hades pushed him awkwardly away after about ten seconds, then took a step back, like he was uncertain of himself, the whole situation.

‘It was not your fault,’ Hades said. ‘If you say such things come naturally to me, then trust my judgement at least in this, Zagreus. Now, are you coming home or not?’

Impatience in his father’s voice, the kind borne out of uncertainty, for Zagreus could see it all through him now. Hades had no idea what he was doing, and he was – like Zagreus – making it up as he went along.

Zagreus almost wanted to stay. After all, his grief wasn’t done, and he had more time to spend staring into dark pits and at fast flowing rivers and thinking about dramatic deaths. But he also couldn’t refuse to honour what his father had offered.

He took a deep, shaking breath and nodded. He followed his father home, and for the first time since he’d brought Persephone home, he walked in through the front entrance.

*

Knowing the shades had been destroyed didn’t give Zagreus the peace he craved.

But it did help.

His life took on a new shape. It was amorphous and formless, but it also wasn’t quite as painful as it had been over the last few weeks. He felt nascent, he read a lot, and spent a lot of time in Persephone’s garden. He drank with Meg sometimes, and spent time with Than, both of them lying down together and talking in Zagreus’ room.

No one pressured him to have sex. He felt no pressure to have it. He’d expected to feel terrible about it, but he found there was a kind of companionship that came from talking, from knowing they cared about whether he wanted to fuck or not. He had to assume that when he wanted to do it again, they’d figure it out.

He hoped they’d figure it out.

Thanatos in particular had a soft look on his face sometimes when he contemplated Zagreus.

‘It’s only that… I have seen some of the things that happen to humans. I am rarely the one that comes for them, in those circumstances, but they feel such pain sometimes. When they are betrayed. And I see echoes of that in you.’

‘And yet you don’t seem disgusted by it,’ Zagreus said, smiling a little.

‘If I’m not careful, you’re going to make me care about them more,’ Than said, echoing that smile.

‘We can’t have that.’

‘They’re baffling creatures, but you have more of their nature within you than I’ve cared to admit in the past.’

‘Is that a compliment?’ Zagreus said.

‘Well, I don’t think it’s an insult.’

Zagreus rolled onto his back on his huge bed, and Thanatos stretched against the headboard, staring off into the distance.

‘I never understood it,’ he said finally. ‘Why you were so unhappy here. But you’re different. Maybe it is that your mother is Persephone, and she is different too. She came to us, she grew her garden, grew something in everyone who remembered her, grew your father, and grew _you_. Then she left, and you were there, and you were one of us, but you were growing something too.’

‘You’re philosophical today,’ Zagreus said.

‘It is a poor cover for feeling wretched that I haven’t been able to be there for you. I keep thinking if I’d been there in Elysium, if I’d arrived sooner…’

‘Than, no, it’s not like that.’

‘Then what is it like?’ Thanatos said. ‘Didn’t you wish for it? I imagine it, I imagine your voice, calling my name.’

Zagreus said nothing. He had cried out for Thanatos, more than once, and he’d cried out for the others, and even his father, his mother. Zagreus wanted to curl up, but held himself back.

‘Meg asks you to drink when she feels like it, and you tolerate that,’ Thanatos said. ‘I turn up when it’s convenient to me, and you tolerate that. Your mother disappears for months on end, and you tolerate that. Nyx vanishes, you tolerate it. You never ask for more. Or, if you do, it is - you’ll hate me for saying this – in a way that’s almost obsequious, certainly self-effacing.’

‘I so love these conversations that we have,’ Zagreus said drily, feeling uncomfortable. ‘What, exactly, are you getting at?’

‘You deserve better,’ Thanatos said, sighing. ‘I’m expressing that poorly.’

‘Ah,’ Zagreus said. ‘Than, if we based this relationship on you expressing yourself well…’

Thanatos huffed out a small laugh. Zagreus felt warm and conflicted and hurt and lost all at the same time when Than’s amber-gold eyes met his.

‘Don’t give up on us,’ Than said quietly.

Zagreus laughed. Some of the bitterness must have translated because Thanatos stiffened, sitting straighter, but Zagreus waved him back down.

‘No, it just never occurred to me to give up on any of you.’

After that, it seemed that Than made more excuses to spend time with Zagreus, and he didn’t have the heart to talk him out of it.

*

‘I was thinking,’ Hades said one day, looking over his paperwork and then setting it down on the grass, for he’d taken to bringing some of it with him when they sat by the stream together. ‘Testing the security of the realm shouldn’t fall to just one person. It has been far too long since I’ve gone down there myself to see how it fares.’

Zagreus frowned at him.

‘Would you come with me?’ Hades said.

‘Forgive me,’ Zagreus said. ‘I seem to have stepped into a parallel universe where my father suggests that we go on father-son trips to the Underworld together.’

Hades hmphed out a sound of dissatisfaction, but before he could say anything, Zagreus felt an itchiness, some kind of need, growing with the idea.

‘Yes,’ Zagreus said. ‘I could come with you.’

Maybe that would be the thing. Maybe that would be the magic bullet that would finally get him through to the other side of this block that had changed his entire life.

*

It ended with him on his knees in Asphodel, his knees burning, and Hades standing protectively by him even though the place had been cleared and no monsters remained. But it was too close to Elysium, Zagreus could tell, and he was gasping and furious that his father was seeing him like this and when Hades took a step closer, he snapped.

_‘DON’T!’_ he shouted.

And so Hades didn’t move, and Zagreus stayed frozen in his own stupid, _stupid_ fear and then in his shame.

It was an hour later – an hour of bubbling lava and the hisses of rock that couldn’t quite hold up to it in the long-term – that Hades cleared his throat. Zagreus stared down at the basalt and thought it was a miracle, a _miracle,_ that his father hadn’t mocked him.

But it didn’t matter, for in the silence, Zagreus was more than able to mock himself.

Eventually, he stood, rubbing at his face and staring out at the platform that would take him closer to Elysium. He had to turn away, which meant his father could see him. But Hades wasn’t looking at him, he was looking into the distance.

‘When was the last time you got this far?’ Hades said quietly.

‘I can’t remember,’ Zagreus said, his voice rough.

‘Is it further than usual, since the event?’

‘I…’ Zagreus looked around. ‘I- In a while, yes.’

‘Then perhaps, when you’re ready, we shall do this again.’

Zagreus realised then, what his father was trying to do. That his father had thought ahead and tried to think of something practical that might help, and had expected Zagreus to stall out like this. It was the only explanation for his implacable patience, his stubborn acceptance of Zagreus’ state. His father’s compassion struck him so hard that his face crumpled all over again, and this time when his father stepped towards him, he couldn’t find the will to push him away.

They went home soon after, and didn’t speak of it again.

*

Time gave him the tools to rebuild himself, as did the willingness of those who cared for him to change how they expressed that care. But he rebuilt himself around cracks and fissures and scars that he was sure would never leave. He’d made a kind of peace with it. Or, more accurately, he still had days where he couldn’t stand any of it – what had happened, how he’d changed, what he’d become, the version of himself that he’d lost – but they were fewer now, and he was beginning to enjoy himself again.

His lows were lower, but the highs were oddly warmer and brighter than before.

He and his father went out into the Underworld once every week or so. Sometimes Zagreus baulked before they even made a proper foray into Tartarus, and sometimes he baulked in Asphodel. And once he killed the Hydra – for his father rarely helped so much as assisted when it became clear that Zagreus’ terror was going to get him killed – and stood there shaking while his father suggested they at least… _see_ Elysium.

‘Don’t make me beg,’ Zagreus said roughly that day. ‘Don’t make me beg to go home.’

So they’d returned, even though Zagreus had felt so close, so _close_ to being able to handle it.

He wasn’t there yet, but he was closer than before.

*

Sometimes he regressed, sometimes he couldn’t go at all. Sometimes he sat in the pomegranate garden and singed the grass underfoot as he paced with agitation and fury and grief and other things he didn’t have names for. Often, his father wasn’t there, but sometimes he was.

The thing about Hades – Zagreus had learned – was that he was so broad and strong that none of Zagreus’ emotions seemed to truly bother him anymore. He absorbed all of them. He was a stubborn constant, as unwilling to leave Zagreus to his downward spirals as he’d once been unwilling to compromise when it came to letting Zagreus leave the House in the first place.

‘I once changed for your mother,’ Hades said. ‘I can change for you.’

‘You have changed,’ Zagreus said.

‘Yes,’ Hades said. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but he was silent.

‘Have you told anyone about what happened to you?’ Hades said that day, and Zagreus looked at him in confusion.

‘You know what happened.’

Hades grimaced. And Zagreus abruptly realised that Hades wanted him to talk to about it in _detail._ And he was shaking his head, holding a hand up, and Hades just nodded because he’d seemed to realise that Zagreus _couldn’t._

‘Don’t ask that of me,’ Zagreus said.

‘Did you hear me ask that of you? I merely asked if you had,’ Hades said, almost prim.

‘You know, this is almost putting me in a mood to go and slaughter some of your shades.’

‘Good,’ Hades said, looking relieved. He stood and Zagreus did as well, and they left together, venting their frustrations on the wretched creatures that didn’t stand a chance against the two of them fighting side by side.

*

‘What if I don’t want to do this forever? Testing the security of the realm?’ Zagreus asked his father one day. ‘I know I kind of created a job for myself in your realm…’

‘Based on your sheer disobedience.’

‘Yes,’ Zagreus said. ‘I said that far more diplomatically than you did.’

‘If you want diplomacy, you’re in the wrong realm,’ his father muttered.

‘ _Anyway._ What if I don’t want to do this forever? What then? Everyone else was created to a purpose.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Hades said.

‘You drew the short straw,’ Zagreus admitted. ‘You’ve said before. But you’re not the kind of person to abandon your station. And I’ve…already abandoned mine.’

‘My job doesn’t come with the same risks as yours,’ Hades said firmly. ‘They’re not comparable situations. If you decide you don’t want to security test the Underworld anymore, you’ll find something else you wish to do. You seem to have the act of annoying me well in hand.’

‘Ha. Ha.’

Hades seemed to find himself hilarious because he smiled at his own joke.

‘I don’t know what you want me to tell you,’ Hades said eventually. ‘You have a home in my House, it is not contingent on you stress-testing the realm, it is contingent on you being my son. And nothing, _nothing,_ has ever changed that.’

‘Even when you wished it would,’ Zagreus said, rolling his eyes.

‘Yes. Even when I wished it would.’

‘But…this hasn’t made you wish that-’

‘ _No.’_ His father’s voice gained that tone, that huge, wall-rattling tone that meant he was being utterly serious, and Zagreus had better shut up about it. But it was soothing to hear in this context.

‘If you’re sure…’ Zagreus said, unable to help himself.

‘You are my son,’ Hades said implacably. ‘You are stuck with me. I cannot tell which of us it punishes more.’

‘Be magnanimous, you can say it punishes the both of us equally.’

‘Yes,’ Hades said, a rare sparkle of humour entering his eyes. ‘Yes, perhaps I will say that, then.’

Zagreus looked over at the stream, and when he looked back at his father, Hades was looking at him with a rare expression on his face. It was the fondness he reserved for Persephone and Cerberus. Instead of hiding it away when Zagreus caught that softness there, Hades’ expression didn’t shift.

It occurred to Zagreus that maybe Hades didn’t find him difficult to be around at all, these days. Or certainly not right now. And then it occurred to him that he actually _enjoyed_ his father’s company, and he excused himself and went to his bedroom, because he hardly knew what to do with that information, or the fact that he liked it so much.

*

He felt like he might make it to Elysium today. Even if he didn’t go far. Even if he stopped and turned around as soon as he saw the river Lethe. But he felt like the appeal of experiencing that green coolness might be strong enough to overcome his fear.

And, for once, he knew that he if he didn’t make it this time, he was closer to making it than ever before. It gave him space for determination to bloom inside of him, even a nervy eagerness, a need to see his will be done.

He turned to his father.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

His father looked at him with grim acknowledgement, and they walked into Tartarus together.


End file.
